To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Always
inspiring my sense of quantum poetics is clinamen, the atomic swerve, a
foundational concept in Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysics that might be expressed in Werner
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, a key breakthrough in quantum mechanics
that proposes simultaneous values cannot be assigned to the position and
momentum of a physical system. If language is not merely descriptive but participates
in the formation of physical reality, then poetry might be said to constitute a
manipulation of physics, which would redefine poetry as not just a phenomenon
of consciousness or an ontological and/or epistemological activity, but also as
a clinamatic mutation on physical reality, or what might be thought of as
nature. Poetry in this context could be capable of what Christian Bök
identifies in ’Pataphysics: The Poetics
of an Imaginary Science (Northwestern University Press, 2001) as the
“prohibited hypothesis” of ’pataphysics, where “the most radical gesture in
science” through the “impulse to revolutionize the condition of the species”
could entail “the abolition of the species itself.” It certainly seems possible
that the most radical gesture in poetry could destroy poetry by redefining it,
as innovations in poetry might be thought of as abolishing the relevancies of its
previous forms; this is the avant-garde. However, if poetry is a physical
mutation on nature, which includes humanity, could its most radical gesture,
like the most radical gesture in science, destroy the species? If matter cannot
be destroyed but only redistributed as energy or another form of matter, then
annihilation might be thought of as an antecedent to transition, or what could
be thought of as novelty, where matter changes, its borders mutable and adjustable.
In poetry, distinct objects compared in metaphor are often changed by the act
of comparison, suggestive of how molecules are changed by observation, and how,
according to Heisenberg, “the transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’
takes place during the act of observation.” Walt Whitman: “And now [the grass]
seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” Thus, chance could be defined
as physical change—taking the form of creation, destruction, or any nuance in
between—prompted by novelty.

In conjunction with the expanding and
accelerating multiverse, our experience of physical reality might expand and
accelerate at varying scales, including subatomic and astronomical scales and
what we encounter at eye level. We create technologies like microscopes and
telescopes to interact more significantly with the multiple scales of physical
reality, and as such technology advances so do our capacities to create through
other mediums. One hypothesis of quantum poetics is that poetry, as a
multiversal technology, ricochets between pattern and the clinamatic swerve toward
novelty within multiple scales of physical reality through known and unknown
dimensions.

The Alphabets of the Future are Wormholes

Heisenberg,
whose uncertainty principle was part of his development of matrix mechanics,
was concerned that quantum theory does not have an adequate language beyond
mathematics to describe it. Heisenberg comes close to proposing that poetry is
that language in Physics and Philosophy
(1958) when, immediately after articulating this concern, he references
Goethe’s Faust to describe his
understanding of the structure of language. Mephistopheles says that while
formal education instructs that logic braces the mind “in Spanish boots so
tightly laced,” and that even spontaneous acts require a sequential process
(“one, two, three!”):

In
truth the subtle web of thought

Is
like the weaver’s fabric wrought:

One
treadle moves a thousand lines,

Swift
dart the shuttles to and fro,

Unseen
the threads together flow,

A
thousand knots one stroke combines.

Heisenberg,
while arguing that science must be as attentive to imagination as to logic,
also seems to be suggesting that novel sciences must be described by novel
languages. As I learned in kevin mcpherson eckhoff’s rhapsodomancy (Coach House, 2010), the alphabets of the future are
wormholes: creative forms of language like poetry have the ability to not only
describe novel expressions of physical reality but to invent them through its
shorthand, “one treadle” moving “a thousand lines,” where a “thousand knots one
stroke combines.” Since the concern in theoretical physics today is reconciling
quantum mechanics with relativity through proposals such as string theory,
poetry might be thought of as an experiment in physics and physics as a field
test for poetry.

Physics is the
study of physical reality. Following in the tradition of Western atomic science
from Thales to Democritus, contemporary theoretical physicists are considering
how the multiverse’s subatomic, vibrating membranes of energy—the open and closed
strings of string theory—might function as elementary constituents of matter.
In literary terms, string theory could be thought of as a critical theory; it
not only describes physical elements within spacetime, such as elementary elements,
it attempts to describe spacetime itself. Physicists, like poets, think through
and with multiple forms of language. One intersection between poetics and theoretical
physics that fascinates me occurs at the scale of diction, where theoretical
physicists describe the strings of string theory as “open” and “closed,” just
as Lyn Hejinian, in her essay, “The Rejection of Closure” (1983), describes
open and closed texts. In string theory, a closed string is topologically
equivalent to a circle, having no end points, whereas an open string is
topologically equivalent to a line interval, having two end points. According
to Hejinian, one “tentative characterization” of the closed text is “one in
which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of it.”
In addition, “each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from any
lurking ambiguity.” A closed text might be visualized as a circle, as having no
beginning and end points in which to imaginatively enter or exit the text, thus
situating the writing and reading of such a text within the circle’s interior,
where “all the elements of the work are directed.” The open text, on the other hand,
“foregrounds process,” “invites participation,” and is “open to the world and
particularly to the reader,” according to Hejinian. Open texts, topologically
speaking, would have end points, entries and exits in which the imagination
participates, multiplying readings. The open text operates outside of the
closed text’s interior circle, its extended topology uncurling into a line.
Hejinian casts the line farther: “Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but
forces…” In quantum poetics, I imagine clinamen as a form and force of physical
reality and poetry that can be open, closed, and/or open and closed all at once
by way of the quantum jump.

The Matrix

According to
physicist Gino Segrè’s Faust in
Copenhagen (Penguin, 2008), while the mathematics used by Heisenberg’s
matrix mechanics was not new, the theory itself was original for developing
what Max Born called “symbolic multiplication,” which resulted in illustrating
that the commutative law of arithmetic (AB
equals BA, i.e. 4X3 is the same as
3X4) is not valid in subatomic systems. Heisenberg’s symbolic multiplication
proposed that in quantum mechanics a particle’s position multiplied by its
momentum is not equal to a particle’s momentum multiplied by its position; in
other words, a particle’s position multiplied by its momentum (AB) minus a particle’s momentum
multiplied by its position (BA) was
not zero, as it would be if the product of position and momentum commuted.
Instead, in matrix mechanics, a particle’s position multiplied by its momentum
minus a particle’s momentum multiplied by its position is proportional to
Planck’s constant, a physical constant of subatomic quanta that is nonzero.
Since Planck’s constant is always nonzero, uncertainty is at play in measuring
observable subatomic phenomenon of the present. By invalidating causality as
well as attempts at measuring non-observable subatomic phenomenon, Heisenberg’s
matrix mechanics suggests that the future position and momentum of subatomic
particles cannot be calculated because the determining elements of the present
cannot be known with certainty. This is one way that quantum mechanics
conceives of time in a novel way. Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics conceived of
space in a novel way, too, offering a new model for how electrons moved within
atoms. In contrast to notions that electrons in atoms moved in orbits like
planets, matrix mechanics describes the motion of electrons as jumps or leaps
from one quantum state to another, reminiscent of clinamen and evoking the
possibility that clinamen could be a physical force like electromagnetism or
gravity that exists not only in creative or metaphorical contexts, but also in
physical reality. In the framework of quantum poetics, such breakthroughs in
physics can be applied to physical reality at all of its scales, visible and
invisible, including cultural and creative scales, and, more specifically, to
language and what I might call its matrix
mechanics, poetry.

If poetry is a
matrix mechanics of language, how can interpretations of poetry be developed with
certainty if a poem’s present state (while creating or experiencing it?) cannot
be described without ambiguity? Conventional notions of meaning are dependent
on linear notions of time, as meaning is arrived at, in time, after
comprehension or examined experience. Most reading relies on linear notions of
time, as well, since grammars often follow a progression that occurs before
comprehension or examined experience is reached. However, poetry can usurp conventional
interactions with time when the writer-reader experiences language outside of linear
time, which might include time slowing, time speeding up, a sense of no time,
or a sense of all times at once, where simultaneity occurs between time scales.
Poems also work in tandem (toward unity and/or disjunction) with space in a way
that is attentive to the spacetime of the poem’s medium, which transcends physical
contexts such as the page, screen, or voice. In poetry, as in quantum
mechanics, it might not be possible to forecast the future with certainty; any
measure of a poem’s activity might only be described in terms of probability.

Dr. Lisa
Randall, the Harvard particle physicist I saw lecturing on CERN just before the
Large Hadron Collider went operational, called herself “a model builder.” Asking
us to use our imaginations, she showed us crude graphs of open and closed
strings in string theory to illustrate the hypothesis that our universe is a
low-gravity universe while other dimensions in the multiverse, which are called
“branes,” are high-gravity universes. I was interested in her arguments as well
as how she presented them, taking note that she used two-dimensional illustrations
to portray eleven-dimensional concepts. Considering the homophonic relevance of
the word “brane” as well as Heisenberg’s concern that quantum mechanics requires
a language beyond mathematics to describe it (like poetry?), I have decided
that I, too, am a model builder. I construct poems that construct me—

In my sense of
quantum poetics, which I think of as a mode of examination that applies
principles in theoretical physics and ’pataphysics to poetry, the cultural and creative
dimensions of physical reality are not as distinct from physics as
discipline-specific discourse would have us assume. Quantum poetics posits that
poetry and science are activities linked through what Jarry calls “imaginary
solutions,” and that this exchange between disciplines is not metaphysics but Jarry’s
’pataphysics, where exceptions are the rule. Such exchanges invite more significant
conversations between disciplines, or what might be thought of as translations.
There seems to be a belief among poets that the best translators of poems from
one language to another are poets, since those who write poetry can represent
challenging or traditionally un-translatable forms and concepts using
approaches from poetry that a poet would understand in a way that someone who
doesn’t write poetry might not. Translation is also a political discourse with
its inherent focus on expanding communication and experience between cultures.
It might also be a conceptual discourse when translations are attempted between
what are usually thought of as distinct modes of inquiry, as in quantum poetics.
The ordinary risk of translation in any of these contexts might be that the translation
fails at adequately communicating or representing what’s being translated.
However, thinking of translation in terms of success and failure doesn’t take
into account self-reflexive translations and how translation might operate
within gradations of success and failure. Perhaps due to the inescapable result
of mistranslation, the act of translation is thus always a creative act,
evoking more questions than it can resolve, questions that imagine solutions
that ask more questions. This is one outcome of reaching across forms in the
multiverse. Imaginary solutions multiply.

Therefore, indefinitely:

POETRY IS THE
TANGENTIAL POINT BETWEEN BRAIN AND BRANE.

’Pataphysics is
the physics of poetry….

[Parts one to three of "Quantum Poetics," as well as examples of Catanzano's poetry, have appeared elsewhere on Poems and Poetics.]

8 comments:

Thank you, Amy, for this. The final equation is brilliant. I must investigate the previous sections of the piece. For some years now I have been in a collaboration with video artist Jeremy Welsh,as The Quantum Brothers, exploring the semantic polyverse via a quantum aesthetic as in:

Dear Brother Paul, thank you for these links to your quantum semantic polyverse—“explain the following: how many and why...” Thanks, too, for your response to the final equation in my essay. It derives, in part, from the final equation in Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neo-Scientific Novel.

This is my intro to Catanzano's work, and I now intend to dig deeper (at the very least on Poems and Poetics) and search within the intriguing references as well...

A few thoughts come to mind when I read this:

1) I've been conceiving a literary proposition for the death of "Man" in the instance of the death of "God" as per Nietzschean thought and on through a densely mythologically informed theory of writing balanced keenly on an ever-thinning boundary between poetry and prose crafts, in which case I resonate deeply with the "impulse to revolutionize the condition of the species" as an "abolition of the species itself" this is brilliant!

2) Also there could not be a more fitting conjecture to work from to inform my work on "the power of poetry in the modern world" through an essay I'm working on wherein poetry is now given ground within the scientific community, within the realm of quantum physics...

Finally, I think this is leading us to a contemporary intersection between science as art and art as science in our socio-cultural dialectics, wherein we may move the guiding principle of our archaic animal identity into a universal shift through language, where we may experiment with English at its foundations, and consequently with all human language, to express a dynamic novelty of form, meaning and usage in thought, speech, perception, relation and experience.

Poetry is the multiversal science of intersubjective proof through experience in the creative act!

Usually don't comment on comments, though, based on the direct hit at my wordings, I must say to Ed, that I've since removed myself from the academic world a long time ago, with the intent to breathe the freedoms known outside the trappings of educable creativity. If my wordings sound like blather-erings, I don't apologize, my voice blathers on without you, and without me.

I humbly enjoy your aesthetics, with all due respect, Ed. Though I beg to ask:

Is not this very sight (site), and its founder, steeped in academic science, which while maintaining its own freedoms and liberations, is still not without the exclamations of elder cynics, pointed nonchalant at the eager simplicity of youthful energy, imbued in words subject to who, YOU?

Thank you, Ed. I know now to step clear away from ever expressing thought in the form of a comment out loud here again.

A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]